The fund necessary for the administration of JPNIC is obtained from the membership fees of the JPNIC members who are related to intercontinental network projects. JPNIC requests the participating networks for membership fees depending on the scale of the networks. The scale of each network is determined by the number of organizations taking part in it. The fund is established in a common center for all of the network projects, and the operational expenses paid to JPNIC by the network projects depend on the scale of the network.

On the other hand, because of the contributions from academic organizations, academic and other networks are divided into type A and type B respectively. The number of delegates eligible to participate in the General meeting is also decided by the scale of the organization.

+-----+-------------+--------------------+----------------+------------+
|     |             |Major members are   |Fees(per person)|Delegates   |
|Class|Organizations|  individual Members|Type A | Type B |(registered)|
+-----+-------------+--------------------+-------+--------+------------+
|   1 |      -  10  |         -   10,000 |     2 |     10 |        1   |
|   2 |   11 -  20  |  10,001 -   20,000 |     3 |     15 |        2   |
|   3 |   21 -  30  |  20,001 -   30,000 |     4 |     20 |        2   |
|   4 |   31 -  50  |  30,001 -   50,000 |     5 |     25 |        3   |
|   5 |   51 -  70  |  50,001 -   70,000 |     6 |     30 |        3   |
|   6 |   71 - 100  |  70,001 -  100,000 |     7 |     35 |        3   |
|   7 |  101 - 200  | 100,001 -  200,000 |     8 |     40 |        4   |
|   8 |  201 - 300  | 200,001 -  300,000 |     9 |     45 |        4   |
|   9 |  301 - 500  | 300,001 -  500,000 |    10 |     50 |        5   |
|  10 |  501 - 700  | 500,001 -  700,000 |    11 |     55 |        5   |
|  11 |  701 -1000  | 700,001 -1,000,000 |    12 |     60 |        5   |
+-----+-------------+--------------------+-------+--------+------------+
                                         Membership fees: 10,0000yen/person
            

While the financial foundations of JPNIC are mainly based on the membership fees, several problems have become clear.

• The problem of dividing academic networks from other networks. Internet is widely spreading among academic, commercial, government, local government, educational and other organizations, and it is functioning as an important basis for intercontinental information. In this situation fairness has become a main factor, and it seems that the basis for classifying academic from non-academic organizations has become less effective since when JPNIC was first established.
• The problem of a rise in expenses due to a rapid growth in official works like registrations. At present JPNIC does not charge for IP address and Domain name registration. The intercontinental growth of Internet has crossed the past prediction in a large way, and as a result, the expenses of the office is on a rise due to the cost required for the registrations.
• Although, at present JPNIC is working as a volunteer organization, in order to maintain stability for future NIC activities, it might be necessary to think in the direction of transforming JPNIC into a corporational organization. For that it is necessary to secure strong financial basis.

In order to solve these problems, JPNIC has set up a working group (Finance-WG) and this group performs discussions related to membership fees and financial basis. Based on these discussions, a new idea for membership fees was proposed during the General meeting of autumn 94, and a part of it was approved.

The main point of the new idea was to introduce a charge based on allocation of resources. Until now, JPNIC did not charge for IP address or Domain name registration. Recently, based on the ideas of charging users against the possession of network resources, JPNIC is thinking about introducing two new charges and they are registration and maintenance fees.

    +---------+-------------------+---------------------+
    |         | Registration fees |Maintenance fees/year|
    +---------+-------------------+---------------------+
    | Class B |          2,560    |        256          |
    | Class C |             10    |          1          |
    +---------+-------------------+---------------------+
    |  Domain |             10    |          3          |
    +---------+-------------------+---------------------+ (Unit: 1000 yen)
    Registration of network resources and maintenance fees
            

It has introduced registration fees from 1995. Introduction of maintenance cost and change of rules for eliminating the discrimination in between type A and type B are to be discussed in 1996.

Although the introduction of registration fees is approved in the General meeting, for solving the problem of membership fees including registration fees, it is necessary to obtain approval from the Internet community. For that, JPNIC should make itself more open and discussions, decisions related to future developments have to carried out in a more open environment.

JPNIC is promoting these discussions based on mailing list and anyone can participate in these discussions. Anyone having an opinion regarding the membership fees regulation, is requested to send an e-mail to the following address.

finance-wg@nic.ad.jp

In the same way, anyone interested to be included in the mailing list related to the discussions on membership fees, is requested to fill in the following:

Name
e-mail address
Assigned network project name
Organization name

and mail it to,

finance-wg-request@nic.ad.jp